8 ms·

Yeah, this is an inane, self-inflicted, and completely trivially solvable problem. The voice recorder overwrites itself on a two-hour loop. Two hours of voice

Yeah, this is an inane, self-inflicted, and completely trivially solvable problem. The voice recorder overwrites itself on a two-hour loop. Two hours of voice data takes about a gigabyte of space at most. There is no technical barrier to right sizing this, and there is nothing special about the aerospace use case that prevents it. Why would anyone think a two-hour buffer for something so critical would be appropriate? And why would it continue to overwrite itself after it’s grounded? Why is there no backup? Has it never been thought relevant to gather, say, an entire flights worth of data instead? This highlights a complete failure on multiple levels and an inability to critically think about the problem space. How much time was spent implementing a system that under most circumstances where it would be needed would render itself entirely useless?

willcipriano 3y ago
> Why would anyone think a two-hour buffer for something so critical would be appropriate? Probably people in the 70s who thought having a recording at all is star trek stuff.
- pavlov 3y ago
  That would be the same 1970s when the American president was forced to resign because of the extensive voice recordings he made. This wasn’t sci-fi stuff even back then.
- washadjeffmad 3y ago
  Tape recorders are a century old, and tape loops were how answering machines, toys, instruments like the Melotron, and many other devices worked until the digital era. There a lot of things today that are less human-usable than they were a half-century ago, but also much more flexible and less expensive. We're still in a weird transitional phase post-transistor.
hattmall 3y ago
>most circumstances where it would be needed I think if the plane is still operational for 2 hours then the data is a lot less important than the alternative scenarios.
- mattmaroon 3y ago
  In this particular case it doesn’t seem very useful at all. The pilots had no idea why the door plug ejected. They landed the plane as per normal. They are still alive to tell us what they did know, which is probably nothing relevant.
gruez 3y ago
From the article: >Debate about whether to adopt the longer recording standard weighs considerations about cost and privacy implications against safety. >The U.S. FAA has previously rejected the NTSB's call for mandating the retrofitting aircraft with new cockpit voice recorders, saying the costs would be significant at $741 million versus $196 million under incremental upgrades it proposed. >Pilots have also opposed the move, with the union representing pilots for air-freight company Atlas Air telling the FAA the longer recordings would be an invasion of worker privacy. Whether or not a "technical barrier" exists is a non-sequitur. Just because you can get a $10 audio recorder on aliexpress that records 200 hours, doesn't mean it takes $10 to implement this change per plane.
- amelius 3y ago
  > Whether or not a "technical barrier" exists is a non-sequitur. Just because you can get a $10 audio recorder on aliexpress that records 200 hours, doesn't mean it takes $10 to implement this change per plane. I bet many investigators would be very happy with the aliexpress implementation ...
  - rob74 3y ago
    In this case the aliexpress implementation would have worked, but not in cases where the aircraft is literally pulverized on impact, like in the 737 MAX crashes of 2018 and 2019 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Airlines_Flight_302 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Airlines_Flight_302 - "The aircraft impacted the ground at nearly 700 miles per hour (610 kn; 1,100 km/h) [...] Both the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder were recovered from the crash site on 11 March.")
    - freeopinion 3y ago
      You've constructed a false dichotomy. You can have the current 2-hour system and a cheap 24-hour system at the same time. Then you can gradually harden the new addon. This could be a way to make it all even more expensive.
stronglikedan 3y ago
unions. necessary, but often given too much leeway to overstep
- hef19898 3y ago
  And costs, so airlines and the pilot unions are fully alogned, in the US, on that question so far.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  What about management? Congress? It's an issue of power, not of unions.
cfeduke 3y ago
> Why would anyone think a two-hour buffer for something so critical would be appropriate? This sort of negligence is intentional. My guess would be it started as a requirement for analog recording and was carried over without change and purposefully left at two hours when equipment went digital. The fact that EU has a 25 hour length requirement and the FAA refuses to update their rules to extend to some reasonable length tells us everything we need to know about this situation.
- chasd00 3y ago
  > The fact that EU has a 25 hour length requirement and the FAA refuses to update their rules to extend to some reasonable length tells us everything we need to know about this situation. i'll bet lunch the actual recorder hardware in the airplanes is the same with the only difference being a knob set to EU rules or FAA rules.
- frumper 3y ago
  It doesn't sound like they're refusing to do it. It's currently in the comment period. https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/us-faa-wants-new-airplanes-capture-more-cockpit-data-boost-safety-probes-2023-11-30/ https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/us-faa-wa...
marsRoverDev 3y ago
Same reason why the car industry encountered chip shortages, despite there being plenty of chips. They don't want to have to go through the time and expense of re-certifying everything due to all of the red tape. As a result, you end up with the system "that always worked fine".
panick21_ 3y ago
Learning more and more about all these air accients, there is so much that has improved about plane safety and how good it is and so on. But then there are some fucking baffling omission. Its unbelievable how often the voice recording gets overwritten. This has been a problem for literally decades. How this is not solved is mind blowing. This would be trivial to store, and trivial to upload. People have wifi in the plane but somehow we can't upload a few voice recordings and other flight data. (and before somebody jumps on me, yes its not 'trivial' but its a hell of a lot easier then about 1000 other things a modern plane does). And private as an argument doesn't' really work either. The amount of valuable data lost is mind blowing. Not just in cases where things fail, but also in cases where everything goes right. And then, somehow they don't have cameras that allow pilots to see the engines and other vital parts of the plane. Somehow passenger can fucking watch movie. But if a captain wants to know if the engine fell of the plane they have to send somebody from the cabin crew to run around and look out of the window.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
kube-system 3y ago
> Why would anyone think a two-hour buffer for something so critical would be appropriate? For the most severe incidents, recording stops at the end of the incident. The current two hours is an increase of the previous 30 minutes. The old 30 minute limit made a little more sense at the time considering the mechanical nature of the recorders at that time.
phil21 3y ago
Airline pilot privacy. CVRs were always highly contentious when introduced, due to exactly the situations you see today in the media. The pilot unions were concerned that these recordings would be released to the public, both out of context and releasing private personal data not relevant to the public - especially if anything at all salacious could be found. There were strict protections about CVR data never being released, but of course those restrictions more or less no longer exist today in reality - leaks abound. I think those that dismiss this concern entirely are the folks who cannot think critically. It highlights a legitimate concern for workplace privacy, of which the Overton window has shifted drastically into less privacy expectations over my lifetime. The public will nearly unanimously call for 25 hours here, but this was not the case even 40 years ago. I think the benefit outweighs the concerns in this particular case, but you are now seeing the same fight regarding cockpit video recorders. I can't say the pilots are wrong given the history of CVR data breaches. If I were a pilot I'd grudgingly support the existence of the CVRs, but I can't say I'd really like the idea. I've seen how sound bites get taken completely out of context and sound worse than they were intended at the time. I've also seen how CVR data is absolutely critical in resolving some accidents. It's all a tradeoff, but certainly not an immediately obvious one unless you value privacy at zero. Edit: The idea behind the 2 hours thing, was that 2 hours would be plenty of time to record anything relevant to an actual accident. Either the plane is in pieces and recording has stopped, or the recordings get pulled on successful landing after declaring emergency. The entire intent was to limit what was available to only the accident sequences - not general chit chat 5 hours prior to any event while they were waiting for taxi clearance. Technical limitations at the time also didn't hurt this argument. Also I think it's good to point out that relying on the pilots to pull the breaker after an incident is not ideal and one of those things that the union has absolutely kept in as a feature, not a bug. This has obviously been abused.
- panick21_ 3y ago
  > I think those that dismiss this concern entirely are the folks who cannot think critically. So if you don't agree, you can't think critically. Got it. Or maybe, we did think about it critically and simply don't agree. There are various way this can be solved. We have modern encryption that could make this far, far safer then it is today. We have methods from data leaking. We have process to only allow data to be decrypted if required. This would actually force us to really think critically about who has what access when. In planing this the airlines, unions, FAA should sit together with some technical experts and think of this critically. This seems less complex to me then a modern high bypass turbo engine.
grotorea 3y ago
This pilot with a popular youtube channel about aviation and air disasters has an video on the topic, if you want a pilot's perspective on something that as a techie seems obviously outdated in 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMWZCuTQpds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMWZCuTQpds At least the voice recorder is 2 hours instead of half an hour now. But watching those incident videos I've seen a couple that ended up being investigated but the pilots didn't pull the circuit breaker and the investigation was based on the flight recorder, specially in those cases where things end up fine.

willcipriano 3y ago

> Why would anyone think a two-hour buffer for something so critical would be appropriate? Probably people in the 70s who thought having a recording at all is star trek stuff.

pavlov 3y ago
That would be the same 1970s when the American president was forced to resign because of the extensive voice recordings he made. This wasn’t sci-fi stuff even back then.
washadjeffmad 3y ago
Tape recorders are a century old, and tape loops were how answering machines, toys, instruments like the Melotron, and many other devices worked until the digital era. There a lot of things today that are less human-usable than they were a half-century ago, but also much more flexible and less expensive. We're still in a weird transitional phase post-transistor.

hattmall 3y ago

>most circumstances where it would be needed I think if the plane is still operational for 2 hours then the data is a lot less important than the alternative scenarios.

mattmaroon 3y ago
In this particular case it doesn’t seem very useful at all. The pilots had no idea why the door plug ejected. They landed the plane as per normal. They are still alive to tell us what they did know, which is probably nothing relevant.

gruez 3y ago

From the article: >Debate about whether to adopt the longer recording standard weighs considerations about cost and privacy implications against safety. >The U.S. FAA has previously rejected the NTSB's call for mandating the retrofitting aircraft with new cockpit voice recorders, saying the costs would be significant at $741 million versus $196 million under incremental upgrades it proposed. >Pilots have also opposed the move, with the union representing pilots for air-freight company Atlas Air telling the FAA the longer recordings would be an invasion of worker privacy. Whether or not a "technical barrier" exists is a non-sequitur. Just because you can get a $10 audio recorder on aliexpress that records 200 hours, doesn't mean it takes $10 to implement this change per plane.

amelius 3y ago
> Whether or not a "technical barrier" exists is a non-sequitur. Just because you can get a $10 audio recorder on aliexpress that records 200 hours, doesn't mean it takes $10 to implement this change per plane. I bet many investigators would be very happy with the aliexpress implementation ...
- rob74 3y ago
  In this case the aliexpress implementation would have worked, but not in cases where the aircraft is literally pulverized on impact, like in the 737 MAX crashes of 2018 and 2019 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Airlines_Flight_302 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Airlines_Flight_302 - "The aircraft impacted the ground at nearly 700 miles per hour (610 kn; 1,100 km/h) [...] Both the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder were recovered from the crash site on 11 March.")
  - freeopinion 3y ago
    You've constructed a false dichotomy. You can have the current 2-hour system and a cheap 24-hour system at the same time. Then you can gradually harden the new addon. This could be a way to make it all even more expensive.

stronglikedan 3y ago

unions. necessary, but often given too much leeway to overstep

hef19898 3y ago
And costs, so airlines and the pilot unions are fully alogned, in the US, on that question so far.
wolverine876 3y ago
What about management? Congress? It's an issue of power, not of unions.

cfeduke 3y ago

> Why would anyone think a two-hour buffer for something so critical would be appropriate? This sort of negligence is intentional. My guess would be it started as a requirement for analog recording and was carried over without change and purposefully left at two hours when equipment went digital. The fact that EU has a 25 hour length requirement and the FAA refuses to update their rules to extend to some reasonable length tells us everything we need to know about this situation.

chasd00 3y ago
> The fact that EU has a 25 hour length requirement and the FAA refuses to update their rules to extend to some reasonable length tells us everything we need to know about this situation. i'll bet lunch the actual recorder hardware in the airplanes is the same with the only difference being a knob set to EU rules or FAA rules.
frumper 3y ago
It doesn't sound like they're refusing to do it. It's currently in the comment period. https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/us-faa-wants-new-airplanes-capture-more-cockpit-data-boost-safety-probes-2023-11-30/ https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/us-faa-wa...

marsRoverDev 3y ago

Same reason why the car industry encountered chip shortages, despite there being plenty of chips. They don't want to have to go through the time and expense of re-certifying everything due to all of the red tape. As a result, you end up with the system "that always worked fine".

panick21_ 3y ago

Learning more and more about all these air accients, there is so much that has improved about plane safety and how good it is and so on. But then there are some fucking baffling omission. Its unbelievable how often the voice recording gets overwritten. This has been a problem for literally decades. How this is not solved is mind blowing. This would be trivial to store, and trivial to upload. People have wifi in the plane but somehow we can't upload a few voice recordings and other flight data. (and before somebody jumps on me, yes its not 'trivial' but its a hell of a lot easier then about 1000 other things a modern plane does). And private as an argument doesn't' really work either. The amount of valuable data lost is mind blowing. Not just in cases where things fail, but also in cases where everything goes right. And then, somehow they don't have cameras that allow pilots to see the engines and other vital parts of the plane. Somehow passenger can fucking watch movie. But if a captain wants to know if the engine fell of the plane they have to send somebody from the cabin crew to run around and look out of the window.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

kube-system 3y ago

> Why would anyone think a two-hour buffer for something so critical would be appropriate? For the most severe incidents, recording stops at the end of the incident. The current two hours is an increase of the previous 30 minutes. The old 30 minute limit made a little more sense at the time considering the mechanical nature of the recorders at that time.

phil21 3y ago

Airline pilot privacy. CVRs were always highly contentious when introduced, due to exactly the situations you see today in the media. The pilot unions were concerned that these recordings would be released to the public, both out of context and releasing private personal data not relevant to the public - especially if anything at all salacious could be found. There were strict protections about CVR data never being released, but of course those restrictions more or less no longer exist today in reality - leaks abound. I think those that dismiss this concern entirely are the folks who cannot think critically. It highlights a legitimate concern for workplace privacy, of which the Overton window has shifted drastically into less privacy expectations over my lifetime. The public will nearly unanimously call for 25 hours here, but this was not the case even 40 years ago. I think the benefit outweighs the concerns in this particular case, but you are now seeing the same fight regarding cockpit video recorders. I can't say the pilots are wrong given the history of CVR data breaches. If I were a pilot I'd grudgingly support the existence of the CVRs, but I can't say I'd really like the idea. I've seen how sound bites get taken completely out of context and sound worse than they were intended at the time. I've also seen how CVR data is absolutely critical in resolving some accidents. It's all a tradeoff, but certainly not an immediately obvious one unless you value privacy at zero. Edit: The idea behind the 2 hours thing, was that 2 hours would be plenty of time to record anything relevant to an actual accident. Either the plane is in pieces and recording has stopped, or the recordings get pulled on successful landing after declaring emergency. The entire intent was to limit what was available to only the accident sequences - not general chit chat 5 hours prior to any event while they were waiting for taxi clearance. Technical limitations at the time also didn't hurt this argument. Also I think it's good to point out that relying on the pilots to pull the breaker after an incident is not ideal and one of those things that the union has absolutely kept in as a feature, not a bug. This has obviously been abused.

panick21_ 3y ago
> I think those that dismiss this concern entirely are the folks who cannot think critically. So if you don't agree, you can't think critically. Got it. Or maybe, we did think about it critically and simply don't agree. There are various way this can be solved. We have modern encryption that could make this far, far safer then it is today. We have methods from data leaking. We have process to only allow data to be decrypted if required. This would actually force us to really think critically about who has what access when. In planing this the airlines, unions, FAA should sit together with some technical experts and think of this critically. This seems less complex to me then a modern high bypass turbo engine.

grotorea 3y ago

This pilot with a popular youtube channel about aviation and air disasters has an video on the topic, if you want a pilot's perspective on something that as a techie seems obviously outdated in 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMWZCuTQpds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMWZCuTQpds At least the voice recorder is 2 hours instead of half an hour now. But watching those incident videos I've seen a couple that ended up being investigated but the pilots didn't pull the circuit breaker and the investigation was based on the flight recorder, specially in those cases where things end up fine.